Every year, George Fox sets aside a day during the first semester to gather together as a school and pray for our community. Serve Day starts off with breakfast on the quad followed by worship and prayer over our city and the people in it. After the morning session is finished, everyone goes out in groups into the community to serve for an entire day.

I think one of the many great things about Serve Day is how different each experience is every year for each student. This year is my third Serve Day and I was blessed to be able to serve with all the girls in the house I live in! We went to one of the Habitat for Humanity sites in McMinnville and got to clean up the site so the construction workers could continue building houses. Before we started working, some of the people who worked there gave us a tour of the site and the houses that were being built or were almost finished. It was neat getting to see houses that were in different stages of construction.(more…)

Aug. 12, 2015 – The installation of a 220-foot pedestrian bridge provided quite a spectacle on the Newberg campus of George Fox University.

It took about two hours for two massive hydraulic cranes to lift the 29.5- and 36.5-ton preassembled bridge halves into place so they could be joined to span the Hess Creek Canyon in the middle of the campus.

The Liebherr LTM 1500/8.1 and Grove GMK7550 mobile cranes each have booms over 250 feet and each can lift more than 550 tons.

The clear-span timber bridge will connect a new 30,000 square-foot dining facility (to be completed summer 2016) on the east side of the canyon with the primarily academic west side. Anderson Construction Company is overseeing both projects.

The bridge project is projected to cost about $600,000. Pedestrians should be able to use the bridge by Aug. 27.

– 36 cardboard iMac boxes, packing tape and ingenuity created a viral photo viewed millions of times
– A subsequent YouTube video was viewed more than 250,000 times and featured on CBSNews.com

Photo by Jeremy Lloyd, George Fox University

Video by Megan Clark, George Fox University

Updated Aug. 12, 2015

For more than a year, George Fox University systems administrator Mike Campadore had an idea and 34 iMac boxes stored in the back of an engineering classroom. When the dean of the engineering school asked why he didn’t recycle them and clear up the space, he merely said he was saving them for a project.

When more computers arrived in July for a new computer lab, Campadore finally had the boxes he needed to make his “iWheel.” He had estimated it would take 38 boxes to create the perfect wheel, but when he taped together the two sides, he discovered the number was 36.

On his first attempt, he left the Styrofoam inside the boxes, but it made the wheel too heavy. Even without the extra weight, he estimates the finished product weighs 130 pounds and is nearly nine feet tall.

Finally, on Friday, July 31, Campadore asked IT coworker Rich Bass to help him complete the wheel. The two then rolled it out onto the campus quad and made a call to the university marketing department, which sent a photographer. The initial Facebook post was successful, but when a former student shared the image on Reddit the iWheel quickly rose to the top of the popular website’s homepage and went viral. Within a matter of hours the photo had been viewed 3.4 million times on Imgur, was trending on Tumblr, was posted on Twitter by Chris Espinosa (well-known as Apple’s longest tenured employee) and retweeted more than 8,000 times …(more…)

Here at George Fox we live by the motto, “Be Known.” It isn’t just something that we say to lure students into our school, it is something that is lived out every single day by our staff and students. I have never been a part of a community that is so driven to get to know who I am, not only as a student, but also as a person.

I have many Be Known stories from my short time here at Fox, but the one that stands out to me the most came from the first semester of my sophomore year. I walked into my Christian Foundations class and was greeted by Dr. Anderson Campbell. He told us to fill out an index card with our name and a prayer request; he said that this was the way that he was going to be taking attendance for the rest of the year. At first I didn’t think anything of it – I thought it was just a clever way to take attendance without having to take time out of class.(more…)

Every year, George Fox invites incoming students to participate in Scholarship Competition. This is a two-weekend event where students come to campus to compete for leadership and academic scholarships. When I competed a couple years back, I remember feeling all the nerves, wanting to say the right words, and just the crazy feeling of being at a place that could potentially be my home for the next four years.

Well, things have come full circle now that I work in admissions as an intern, and I got to help with both weekend events. It was a really neat experience getting to see all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into these weekends. The whole admissions team works really hard to make sure everything is set up and ready to go for when the students arrive on campus. It felt really great to be able to be a part of such a memorable weekend for students.

However, I think my favorite part of the whole experience was being an evening host. Evening hosts are students or interns on campus that hang out with the preview students that don’t plan on staying the night but still want to experience campus life a little more.(more…)

Junior engineering major Dieter Mueller with his new book, Atlas of the Four-Bar Linkage.By Sean Patterson

While strolling through an American Society of Mechanical Engineering expo in Montreal recently, George Fox engineering dean Bob Harder chanced upon a book that caught his eye – not so much because of the title, but because of the author’s familiar name.

The book, Atlas of the Four-Bar Linkage, was coauthored by Dieter Mueller, which just so happened to be the name of one of Harder’s engineering students. “I thought, ‘What a coincidence. He must be some German guru on kinematics who happens to have the exact same name as one of our computer engineering students,’” Harder reasoned.

Upon closer inspection, however, Harder noticed the display booth showcasing the book was from Saltire Software of Tigard, Ore., whose president, Phillip Todd, had attended George Fox’s Engineering Expo and Reverse Career Fair in December of 2013. Todd attended the event seeking an intern for the following summer – an intern who ended up being Dieter Mueller.(more…)

George Fox sophomore Vlada Wilson is working to raise funds for a family she has never met

By Vlada Wilson

On Dec. 13 I got a Skype call from my family in Ukraine, thinking that it would be the usual, ordinary phone call. But it turned out to be the opposite. I was told of the story of Arceny Bakun, who is a 22-month-old boy with severe lymphoblastic leukemia. Most children at his age are at home with their mom and dad, playing outside with the neighborhood kids or playing with their toys inside the house. Unfortunately, Arceny hasn’t been able to do either of those things because the Kyiv Regional Oncology Center has been his home for more than half of his life.

Arceny’s story has been on numerous new stations in Ukraine, and has gained great attention on Ukraine’s version of Facebook. Fortunately, a bone marrow donor has been found, but the real trouble for the family has been collecting 130,000 euros for the operation. Currently, Arceny is on his fifth dose of chemotherapy while his mom and dad are waiting for the funds to come in. So far they have collected almost 96,000 euros in donations, but they still have more than 34,000 euros left to collect.(more…)

While many students start thinking about the college/university they are interested in attending at the end of their junior year and start of their senior year of high school, very few are thinking about how they will afford college and the college financial aid process.

When does the college financial aid process start? It really should start many years before a student’s senior year of high school. Saving for college early is probably the best step a family or student can take to be able to afford the school of their choice. College savings accounts (such as 529 accounts) are a great way to invest for one’s future education. (more…)

When school starts in August, it always seems that it will take forever to get to this point, but it feels like it comes faster and faster every year. As the month of December rolls around, so does the end of the fall semester. During this time of year, students are turning in their last assignments, staying up late studying, working and gearing up for finals week.

In the midst of all this, it can be hard to remember what the Christmas season is truly all about: celebrating Jesus and his birth. It can be hard to be in the best of moods when you know there is a big project due the next day and you have limited time to get it done. However, that feeling never seems to last long on campus.(more…)

After graduating in December, Nolte will join the core advocacy team at Micah Challenge USA

As Brooke Nolte, a senior sociology major puts it, “It’s one thing to sit in class and learn about the injustices in the world; it’s another to actively engage in addressing those issues.”

As a grassroots advocacy intern with Micah Challenge USA, an organization that pursues justice on behalf of the world’s poor, Brooke reaches out to colleges, churches and individuals to encourage them to join the fight against global poverty. Micah Challenge USA organizes campaigns and events that educate, bring awareness and foster action for the cause. It’s a pursuit Brooke will continue upon graduating from George Fox in December, as she’s been offered a paid position on the organization’s core advocacy team.

Recently we sat down with Brooke to ask about her passion for the world’s poor and to reflect on her George Fox experience.(more…)